Stockholm’s Archipelago and Strindberg’s 53 Scandinavica Vol 52 No 2 2013 August Strindberg’s home town of Stockholm, together with its wilder counterpart, the archipelago or

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Scandinavica Vol 52 No 2 2013

Stockholm’s Archipelago

and Strindberg’s:

Historical Reality and Modern Myth-Making

AbstractThe Stockholm Archipelago is ubiquitous in the prose, poetry,

drama and non-fiction of August Strindberg. This article

examines the interaction in Strindberg’s oeuvre between the city

of Stockholm as civilized space and the wild space surrounding

it, tracing the development of a literary myth of Eden in his

work. Strindberg’s representations of the shifting relations

between city and nature, it is argued, played (and still play)

an important role in the cultural construction of mythologies

of the loss of the wild space. The environments described in

Strindberg’s texts are subject to changes, shifts and repetitions

with variations, such that the archipelago in itself can be read

as a mirror of the polyphony of points of view, the variability

and the ambiguities we find in his oeuvre at large.

KeywordsAugust Strindberg, Stockholm Archipelago, city in literature,

nature in literature, mythologies

Massimo CiaravoloUniversity of Florence

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August Strindberg’s home town of Stockholm, together with its wilder

counterpart, the archipelago or skärgård (literally meaning group,

or circle, of islands and skerries), plays a large part in Strindberg’s

literary universe as well as in his life. The archipelago is ubiquitous in

his oeuvre; it occurs in prose as well as in poetry and in drama, and

it characterizes both fiction, autobiography and non-fiction (essays,

letters and diaries). It can sometimes provide the setting to whole

works, but in a series of other works it can be included as one of the

settings, or even be mentioned peripherally. Images of the archipelago

can be conveyed while the author is living in that natural and social

environment, which frequently occurs in his letters, but he can also

recreate it at a great distance and with a nostalgic eye, as in the cases

of the novel Hemsöborna (The People of Hemsö), written in southern

Germany, and the collection of short stories Skärkarlsliv (Life in the

Skerries), written in Denmark.1

An analysis of the functions and meanings of the archipelago

in Strindberg’s oeuvre appears as a still meaningful and needed

endeavour, although one half of a large work, August Strindbergs

skärgårds- och Stockholmsskildringar by Walter A. Berendsohn (1962),

has been dedicated to this subject. Berendsohn’s book is still useful

as a general survey of the topic and an almost complete catalogue of

Strindberg’s works in which the archipelago plays a part. Its limits are,

however, the vagueness in the analysis of themes and forms, in spite

of some interesting observations, and the sharp separation between

texts set either in the archipelago or in Stockholm or in the area of

lake Mälaren. Nothing is said about a common feature in all these

texts: the ways in which the urban experience and the natural spaces

are related. This leads Berendsohn, for example, to the paradoxical

(and interesting) conclusion that Götiska Rummen (The Gothic Rooms)

is a Stockholm novel and not an archipelago novel (Berendsohn 1962:

193-199), although its protagonists, as we shall see, live on an island

almost throughout the year. What if it were both things?

My purpose is to consider Strindberg’s representation of the

relation and the interaction between the big town of Stockholm and its

archipelago, i.e. between the civilized and the wild space. This relation

has been a major concern in Swedish culture since Strindberg’s

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lifetime, when the middle class and their bourgeois lifestyle started

to expand, and the wild space began consequently to be conquered

by the civilized space, a process that has been going on up to present

time, often causing a sense of irremediable loss.2 My aim is to consider

this phenomenon both as a real context in terms of geography, society

and cultural history – a context Strindberg was consciously part of

during the second half of the nineteenth and the first decade of the

twentieth century – and as a point of departure for the writer’s recurring

adaptation of the myth of Eden to the Stockholm area. The attempt

implies that these spatial relations, as they become text, are considered

– according to Jurij Lotman’s and Angelo Marchese’s suggestions –

as a significant structure conveying cultural models and conceptions

of life, rather than a set of ornamental or background descriptions.3

The fascinating aspect is that these conceptions vary considerably

in Strindberg. The milieus are subject to interesting changes, shifts

and repetitions with variations, in such a way that the archipelago in

itself can be read as a mirror of the polyphony of points of view, the

variability and the ambiguities we find in his oeuvre at large.4 Another

challenge for the modern reader is that Strindberg – as concrete

and precise as he always is in his observations5 – creates a literary

myth of the skärgård and of Stockholm’s relation to it. The ultimate

purpose of my article is to show how Strindberg’s representations,

undoubtedly subjective and unique, also partake in a wider Swedish

cultural construction of what Roland Barthes defines as contemporary

myths of our bourgeois world6.

Some limitations in the scope of my analysis must be pointed out.

It will not include works that deal with islands outside the Stockholm

archipelago, as the early play Den fredlöse (The Outlaw) from 1871,

set on Island in the Middle Ages, or the story ‘De lycksaliges Ö’ (The

Fortunate’s Isle), from 1884 and 1890, presumably describing a place

in the Atlantic or Caribbean. Also the lake Mälaren, which can be

included in the Stockholm archipelago from a geological point of view,

and Gamla Stan, the historical centre of Stockholm, originally an island

in this landscape, represent something different from what I want to

focus. I will therefore not deal with Gamla Stockholm (Old Stockholm)

from 1880-82, Strindberg’s collection of culture-historical essays, or

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with works – such as the play Midsommar (Midsummer) from 1900 and

the long poem ‘Stadsresan’ (The Trip to Town) in the collection Ordalek

och småkonst (Word Play and Minor Art) from 1902 and 1905 – that

depict a celebration of summer at the lake Mälaren or, more exactly,

in the space between Mälaren and Stockholm. My specific interest lies

in the process of modernity, when Stockholm became a big city and

the urban bourgeoisie turned east in their search for nature, recreation

and vacation, preferring the skärgård and its marine wilderness to the

more domesticated landscape of the lake7.

The skärgård is a unique landscape, found in the Baltic Sea to the

east of Stockholm and, further east, between the island of Åland and

the south-western coast of Finland. The terms used in Swedish express

two concepts: arkipelag – as it originally appears in the Aegean Sea –

and skärgård. The difference in meaning may be slight, as a skärgård

is after all a form of archipelago. However, an arkipelag consists of

bigger islands, at a greater distance from one another and from the

coast, and the focus of the word is on the islands. More specifically,

a skärgård indicates a system of smaller islands, skerries and rocks,

situated not far from the mainland or from one another, and forming

one landscape with the coastline, the bays and the surrounding sea.

The somewhat shifting semantic divide between ö, holme, kobbe and

skär indicates a scale from the bigger to the smaller island, which is

another trait of this peculiar scenery. Stockholms skärgård is formed

by approximately 24,000 islands and skerries. The area it occupies,

along the coast of the regions Uppland and Södermanland (with the

city of Stockholm between them), has an extension of about 150

kilometres from North to South, while the greatest breadth from the

mainland is about 80 kilometres. It consists mainly of primary bedrock,

granite and gneiss. This bedrock is probably two billion years old, but

in a geologically recent period (the last million years, i.e. the latest part

of the Quaternary or glacial period) it was under the pressure of ice,

which eroded and shaped a characteristic landscape of rounded and

smooth primary rock. This phenomenon applies to the whole territory

of Sweden, but it appears more evident and, as it were, naked in the

wild area of the archipelago (Hedenstierna 2000a: 9-23). One feels

undoubtedly closer to the elements and their origin out there, and

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this primordial and cosmic feeling is also what some of Strindberg’s

characters experience. Another phenomenon that conveys the idea of

ancestral origin is that the primary rocks and the coast are still rising

after the end of the latest glaciation (about ten thousand years ago).

At present they rise by approximately 30-40 centimetres in a century

(Hedenstierna 2000a: 25-27). The number of the islands is therefore

difficult to determine precisely: some new rocks emerge, while some

separate islands and skerries merge.

The experience of losing contact with one’s natural origins, and

yearning for them by representing the earthly paradise as an orchard

or a garden within a pleasant countryside, often situated on an island

or in an archipelago, has belonged to Western culture at least since

the Bible and classical antiquity, as shown by Arturo Graf (1965) and

Jean Delumeau (1992). Even the Swedish expression sommarparadis,

evoking the holidays and commonly associated with the archipelago

for the modern Stockholmers, bears this heritage. During Strindberg’s

lifetime, which was also a time of industrial, technical and scientific

revolution in Sweden, the civilized city dwellers discovered untouched

nature, or rather, they saw with new eyes an environment that

was well-known from time immemorial. This cultural construction

objectified modern mankind’s loss of nature, and compensated for

it. The archipelago, situated in another place and in a wild space,

was becoming rapidly closer and available, thanks to the modern

communication and transport facilities. The city was expanding in all

directions, even towards North-East and East, thus incorporating the

natural space made of islands, skerries, rocks and water. Steamboats,

newspapers, telegraph and telephone are historical realities as well as

recurring elements in Strindberg’s texts. In his multi-faceted literary

universe these objects of our modernity become symbolic markers,

pointing at various meanings and dimensions; but they clearly also

perform a spatial function, connecting places and mediating between

them: in our case the inner and the outer spaces, the city and the

islands, the urban lifestyle and the wilderness, the expanding, dynamic

and global middle classes and the rural, more static and more secluded

world of local peasants, pilots, fishers and hunters.

As Per Wästberg and Bertil Hedenstierna have shown, this conquest

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of natural space reflected a need expressed, initially, by the wealthy

upper-middle class of Stockholm in the last decades of the nineteenth

century.8 However artists, too, played an important role in this process

of incorporation. If the rich entrepreneurs of the industrial era found

a status symbol in the spacious villas, newly built for themselves

and their families in the inner part of the archipelago, people like

Strindberg, Carl Larsson and Anders Zorn preferred to rent humble

cottages from peasants and fishers, looking for more authentic spots

on the islands farther out.9 As we shall see, Strindberg partook in both

dimensions, the more bohemian at first, and the more bourgeois later

in his life. The Stockholmers of that time, the bourgeois as well as the

bohemian, used to treat themselves to leisure with a certain generosity

in summer, when holiday could last three months, or sometimes even

longer. It was a privilege and a moment of bliss which Strindberg, too,

could enjoy on some occasions. His life and work were, in this respect,

part of a collective social history.

Strindberg’s father was a shipping agent, who mainly worked with

the boats that travelled on the lake Mälaren, to the west of Stockholm.

The first part of the autobiography Tjänstekvinnans son (The Son of

a Servant) from 1886 describes Strindberg’s first encounter with the

archipelago, which occurred in 1866, when he was seventeen. It proved

to be an epiphany and a lifelong love, something that inexplicably

appealed to the teenager and with which he deeply identified.

Strindberg writes retrospectively about his alter ego Johan’s reaction

in front of this natural scenery:

Där öppnade sig plötsligt en tavla som kom honom att frysa

av förtjusning. Fjärdar och holmar, fjärdar och holmar, långt,

långt ut i det oändliga. Han hade fastän stockholmare aldrig

sett skärgården förr, och visste ej var han var. Den tavlan gjorde

ett sådant intryck som om han återfunnit ett land han sett i

vackra drömmar, eller i en föregående existens, som han trodde

på men ej visste något om. [...] Detta var hans landskap, hans

naturs sanna miljö; idyller, fattiga knaggliga gråstensholmar

med granskog, kastade ut på stora stormiga fjärdar och med

det oändliga havet som bakgrund, på vederbörligt avstånd.10

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(Suddenly a picture opened out which made him shiver with

delight. Bays and islands, bays and islands stretching far out

into infinity. Although a Stockholmer, he had never seen the

archipelago before, and did not know where he was. That picture

made such an impression, as if he had found again a land seen

in beautiful dreams, or in an earlier existence, in which he

believed but about which he did not know anything. […] This

was his landscape, the true environment of his nature; idyllic

spots, poor, rough granite islands with spruce forests scattered

on big, stormy bays and with the endless sea as a background,

at a safe distance.)

Commenting on this passage, Björn Meidal posits that it was crucial

for the protagonist that his discovery occurred when he was alone and

far from his father and the rest of the family.11 It became an important

psychological factor in the young man’s process of emancipation.

Another interesting aspect is that the realistic recollection of what

happened twenty years before allows visionary overtones, as Olof

Lagercrantz has suggested.12 The protagonist is perceiving with his

senses the real southern Stockholm archipelago, caught with a bird’s

eye view from the mainland at Tyresö; but he is at the same time

transferred to another dimension. That natural sight suggests both

a hidden origin, a previous existence, and something that, equally

invisible, lies far away, beyond the perspective view of the infinite

sequence of islands, skerries and bays.13 The first experience of

the archipelago is depicted almost as a sacred revelation of a home

beyond the phenomena, and the word paradis is used to convey this

metaphysical perception.14

Strindberg confesses the same special attraction to this

environment in the introduction to Skärkarlsliv15, an unparalleled

spatial description that can combine a concisely accurate focus on

the local nature with the adaptation of the myth of earthly paradise

to a northern climate. To the author’s eyes the environment displays

an attractive ‘variation of gloomy and smiling, poor and rich, pretty

and wild, inland and coastland’.16 Strindberg’s Linnean approach17 is

evident in his description of the mineral, the vegetable and the animal

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kingdom on the islands, and of the circumstance, underscored also by

Hedenstierna (Hedenstierna 2000a: 9; 24-28), that the moraine and

the clay, left behind in the valleys among the primary rocks after the

glaciation, have given fertile land that has been cultivated, and where

deciduous forests have been growing, producing a fascinating mixture

of garden-like landscape and wilderness.

Given these natural circumstances, the author proceeds to give a

socio-economical and psychological mapping of the population of

the archipelago. The rural classes are basically three: the farmers on

the bigger islands; the farmers on the smaller islands, who practise

agriculture on a minor scale and combine it with fishing; and the real

skärkarlar (people from the outer skerries), who live on hunting,

fishing and a little subsistence agriculture. Another part of the

population has found jobs in the navy, the merchant navy, the Swedish

Customs and the pilotage service, whereas a more recent source of

income originates from the summer guests. Tourism from the big town

is developing in this traditionally rural area, but in 1888 Strindberg

must still observe that the archipelago forms a rather secluded little

world with no regular communications with the mainland.18 Lonely

people live here, including those who, for some reason, have sought

loneliness, fleeing from the mainland and finding a place of refuge – a

motif that will be developed in later works. A fundamental opposition

is thus formulated between two models – the civilized sphere made of

rules, laws and institutions, and the wild sphere of antisocial characters

and outlaws who try to escape them; such a solitude often produces

visionary dreamers. This preface was written with the aim of directing

the readers’ attention to the main settings, themes and patterns of

the collection, and especially of the longest and most important story,

‘Den romantiske klockaren på Rånö’ (The Romantic Organist of Rånö).

Still, the elements presented in the preface to Skärkarlsliv offer a basic

frame to many other representations of the archipelago in his oeuvre,

from the debut to the last years.

In the early Seventies the young Strindberg worked hard to make his

name as an author. He wrote the prose version of his first masterpiece,

the historical drama Mäster Olof (Master Olof), on Kymmendö, an island

off the expanding resort of Dalarö in the southern archipelago. From

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1871 to 1873 Strindberg spent three summers on the island, where

leisure and work, body and spirit reached a perfect balance, a variation

on the classical mens sana in corpore sano theme.19 Strindberg had

found his first sommarparadis, the natural environment where a

modern writer like him could be on vacation and, at the same time,

creatively productive.20

Between 1872 and 1875 Strindberg wrote also a series of prose

fragments and articles set in the archipelago. From Kymmendö he set

off for expeditions and sailing tours that provided him with material.

The fresh enthusiasm for the discovery is detectable in these texts

combining narrative prose and journalistic reportage, written from the

perspective of a Stockholmer who mediates between the civilized and

the wild world, and observes their meeting during summer, when the

town-dwellers are on vacation. In the prose fragment ‘En berättelse

från Stockholms skärgård’21 (A Story from the Stockholm Archipelago),

probably written in 1872 (SV II: 193-196), the protagonist is a student

from Stockholm who is fascinated by what he hears and sees in Dalarö

an early summer morning. Already here, through the perspective of

the curious protagonist, Strindberg’s mimetic genius can grasp the

mixture of voices and accents. Dalarö appears as a place where people

from the islands and the mainland mingle; we see and hear the lively

steamboat traffic, local sailors, customs officers and pilots, as well as

summer guests from Stockholm spending their holidays in the resort.22

In one of the dialogues overheard by the student, two bourgeois ladies

are talking. One of them is complaining about the idleness of the

women’s summer existence, spent waiting for their busy men who

come and visit the family only during the weekends, when parties and

activities for the elegant society are organized. She finally declares: ‘I

hate this town life transferred to the countryside’.23 The big town was

conquering the wild space by the sea, and in the woman’s words we

find an early expression of the bourgeois summer rites.

The author’s mediating position is a main feature in the articles

written for the national daily Dagens Nyheter between 1872 and 1875.

Strindberg as a young journalist is a discoverer from town, who is

on a mission in the wilderness, both in summer and autumn.24 He

gives his urban readers a great deal of information about the relatively

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near but culturally still remote islands. And as he draws the public’s

attention, he invites them to discover more, predicting the touristic

development of the area with a mixture of environmental enthusiasm

and bourgeois advertising strategy, as in ‘Livet i Stockholms skärgård’25

(Life in the Stockholm Archipelago) and ‘Brev från Sandhamn’26 (Letter

from Sandhamn). If the task of the modern reporter was to make the

wide urban space familiar and recognizable for the growing reading

public, as Eckhardt Köhn has pointed out (1989), Strindberg actively

contributed, through these articles, to cross the border between society

and wilderness and thus incorporate the peripheral archipelago into

the urban sphere of Stockholm. The exciting sailing trip from Dalarö to

Sandhamn described in ‘Huruledes jag fann Sehlstedt’27 (How I found

Sehlstedt) is also symbolically significant, because Elias Sehlstedt, the

grand old man Strindberg and his friends are visiting, was the first

writer to make the Stockholm archipelago a literary landscape in his

pleasant songs, poems and prose from mid-nineteenth century.28

Although conventional, his output was a source of inspiration for

Strindberg.

Strindberg can already be seen in these early articles, where the

optimistic and curious bourgeois spirit prevails, to give expression to

his anarchistic and antisocial feelings, too. In ‘Post-skriptum till Brev

från Sandhamn’ (A Postscript to Letter from Sandhamn) the writer

considers that the state and the institutions appear, from the point

of view of an autumn and winter in Sandhamn, as ‘a fetish venerated

more than God, a notion void of reality, and yet as real as anything

can be’.29 This meditation is connected to the episode of the clever

pilot, who owing to a wrong manoeuvre in a stormy November night

will undergo a trial and probably be imprisoned. This same episode

becomes a short story in ‘Marcus Larsson advokat’ (Marcus Larsson

the Lawyer)30, which is interesting from the spatial point of view, as

it describes the passage from the wild space among the skerries to

the trial at the Stockholm court. The narrator’s voice tends to express

solidarity with the pilot, showing his dangerous life and pointing out

extenuating circumstances. The pilot is however condemned in court,

also because of the artist Marcus Larsson’s clumsy intervention as a

defence lawyer. The wilderness does not seem to be allowed to exist

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outside the rules of legal society.

A minor but interesting role is played by the archipelago in

Strindberg’s breakthrough novel Röda Rummet (The Red Room) from

1879. Röda Rummet is mainly a Stockholm novel, but a contact with

the archipelago occurs when the protagonist Arvid Falk must be

literally cured of his two romantic illusions: social justice and love. To

do so, his friend doctor Borg takes him drastically out of town – out of

the polis, as it were, and the commitment it stands for – to the island

Nämndö over the summer. The contact with the sea and the natural

environment makes Falk healthy again, where being healthy means for

him, in the bitter final perspective of Röda Rummet, losing every form

of idealism and becoming a passive member of a ruthless society. As

such, Falk can go back to Stockholm at the end of the summer.31

At the beginning of the Eighties Strindberg, now a married man, spent

four long summers with his wife and children on Kymmendö again,

an often glorious time.32 During this period the author’s democratic

and utopian radicalism is strongest, and the contrast between the

constrained life in a rotten, urban society and the free outdoor life

outside of it becomes sharpest. The paradisiac existence on the island

confirms Strindberg’s creed of revolution, and it is not by chance, as

Gunnar Brandell observes, that his inflamed letters to Edvard Brandes,

in the initial phase of their pen friendship, occur when the Swedish

writer is on the island in summer.33 On 22 July 1880 Strindberg

declares himself ‘Jean Jacques’ intimate when it comes to a return to

Nature’, and expresses, from this standpoint, the revolutionary hope

that the existing society may be blown up and started anew.34 And on

26 June 1881 he goes on to explain that he can only believe in a rebirth

through a return to nature, the abolition of towns and the dissolution

of the state, replaced by village communities without any chiefs.35

In a very accurate manner, Sven-Gustaf Edqvist dissertation from

1961 illustrates Strindberg’s reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a

support for the Swedish writer’s revolutionary and anarchistic creed.

Together with Edqvist’s study, the other fundamental contribution

that helps us to explore the dimensions of Strindberg’s adaptations of

Rousseau’s ideas and literary universe is Elie Poulenard’s Strindberg

et Rousseau from 1959. Poulenard underscores an important

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circumstance in this inter-textual relation: Strindberg, a complex and

contradictory writer, adapts to his own needs the texts by Rousseau,

also highly complex and contradictory. The attraction felt by Strindberg

is probably also due to this affinity – the mix of temperament and

reason, religion and rationality we find in both authors. In Discours

sur les sciences et les arts (Discourse on the Arts and Sciences) and

Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes

(Discourse on the Origin of Inequality) Rousseau posits a radical

opposition between the virtuous and free natural state of mankind,

connected to the sphere of rural and rustic life, and the vicious and

constricted condition experienced in the civilized and urban society.

This opposition is important for Strindberg, as it reinforces his own

doubts about the goodness of material progress, and his conception

of art, science and industry as forms of luxury justifying and increasing

social unbalance. There is however in Rousseau’s Du contract social

(The Social Contract) also a more progressive and constructive legacy,

which is equally important for Strindberg’s democratic stance during

the first years of the 1880s: the free social contract of the origins, lost

in the constrictions of present society, is not given once and for ever,

but must be regained within the historical process.36

This democratic stance is strong in Svenska Folket (The Swedish

People), published in 1881-82, and is expressed through the

author’s intention to write a Swedish history from the point of view

of the anonymous people and of everyday life (Ciaravolo 2011). The

archipelago plays a small but interesting part in this project, when

fishing in the Middle Ages is described.37 Writing about medieval

herring fishing on the outer skerries called Huvudskären, in the south-

eastern archipelago, is skillfully transformed into writing about the

medieval traces in the Stockholm area at present, as the narrator

explains that Huvudskären had been in the Middle Ages as they still

were up to some decades previously (Berendsohn 1962: 28-29). The

fact that Strindberg’s field studies in the early Eighties, illustrated by

the painter and friend Carl Larsson38, could teach him something about

fishing practice in the Middle Ages, visualizes the threshold between

old and new, pre-modern and modern times, over which Strindberg

consciously lived and worked in his peculiarly Swedish experience of

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modernity.39

The archipelago appears within a historical frame – the first part of

the sixteenth century – also in the short story ‘En ovälkommen’ (An

Unwelcome Man), published in the series Svenska öden och äventyr

(Swedish Destinies and Adventures) in 1882.40 In the story of Kristian,

who loathes social rules and prefers a wild life fishing and hunting

in the outer skerries by the open sea, we find, conveyed by spatial

relations, an opposition of world models that is typical of Strindberg’s

anarchistic tendencies during the early Eighties, whereby society

corresponds to lies and falsehood (Edqvist 1961: 198-201).

The archipelago plays a relevant part in the section ‘Högsommar‘

(High Summer) of Dikter på vers och prosa (Poems in Verse and Prose),

Strindberg’s first collection of poetry from 1883.41 The prose and verse

poem ‘Solrök’ (Heat Haze) (SV XV: 77-86) is interesting also from the

stylistic point of view, as the protagonist’s story is conveyed by an

interior monologue in the third person, a form of ‘Erlebte Rede’. He

and his family are initially on a steamboat, together with a crowd of

Stockholmers going from town to the islands on a summer day (SV

XV: 77-78). These people are excited and expecting a regeneration

in nature; the protagonist observes them with detachment, but he is

after all a part of that same collective movement from the civilized to

the natural space. In the last section of the poem (SV XV: 83-86), a trip

to a virgin island is described. The protagonist is now alone; he needs

loneliness and wants to reach as far as possible from the crowd. The

unmasking of his dream of regeneration occurs when he sees human

traces on the island (Kylhammar 1985: 43-45). A feldspar cave was

there; now it has been abandoned, leaving devastation behind. It is

common to find veins of feldspar, a more recent kind of rock, in the

primary bedrock. Feldspar became important in the eighteenth and

nineteenth century for the industrial production of pottery, and even

the archipelago was exploited for the purpose (Hedenstierna 2000a:

17-18). In ‘Solrök’, where the author’s perspective is inspired by

Rousseau, the protagonist draws the conclusion that he cannot escape

civilization, as human traces, even one’s own, are everywhere, and

unspoiled nature is an illusion. What finally saves him from pessimism

is the view of his wife in a white summer dress with their child in a pram

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under the oak trees. In spite of the latent tensions behind the apparent

harmony, expressed in the poem ‘Lördagskväll’ (Saturday Evening)

(SV XV: 96), summer family life on the island appears as a form of

paradise in Dikter. In another poem, ‘Morgon’ (Morning) (SV XV: 97-

98), Strindberg depicts what Roland Barthes has defined the modern

myth of the writer on vacation in a natural environment, which helps

him to find concentration and produce more (Barthes 1957: 29-32).

The poem shows how the protagonist, a loving father and husband,

but above all a writer, has an intellectual social function that inevitably

links him to urban activities, projects and habits, although he is in the

silent wilderness.42 Strindberg’s skrivarstuga on Kymmendö, the hut

where he wrote in front of the sea, is a symbol of this myth.

Strindberg would never see Kymmendö again after summer 1883,

but for some years he hoped that he might go there again. The

nostalgic feeling makes the archipelago appear suddenly, as a vision,

while the writer is living abroad. It happens in the sequence ‘Fjärde

Natten’ (The Fourth Night) of the long poem Sömngångarnätter på

vakna dagar (Sleepwalking Nights in Broad Daylight) from 1884, when

the constricted and falsified nature in Bois de Boulogne, embodied by

a small spruce fir that the protagonist sees there, arouses memories

of Swedish summer and its Nordic nature (SV XV: 206-207).43 This

contemporary presence of real and imagined space determines the

structure of Sömngångarnätter (thus shortened), with its interaction

between Paris and Stockholm, civilization and nature.44 The final vision

of ‘Fjärde Natten’, again inspired by Rousseau, consists of a new ice

age, by which civilization – with its excesses, privileges, establishments

and rules – is swept away, and after which a mythical rebirth takes

place (Ciaravolo 2012b: 181-182). The images of glaciation and post-

glacial natural rebirth create associations to the archipelago (SV XV:

219-220).

A similar nostalgic vision is described in the series of articles Från

det vaknande Italien. Sommarbrev i mars45 (From the Awakening

Italy. Summer Letters in March), when the writer is watching the

Mediterranean sea near Genova at sunrise in March 1884 (SV XVIII:

81-82). The tendency of this reportage is to observe Italy from the

point of view of a fault finder, in order to question its romantic myth

66


(Ciaravolo 2012c); and even when things are beautiful, as in front

of the Mediterranean sea, the subjective reporter finds something

lacking, for example some islands and skerries scattered in the gulf,

to fill its emptiness: ‘[…] not islands with oranges, laurel trees and

marble palaces, but small rough gneiss hillocks with thorny spruce firs

and red cottages’.46 Strindberg’s identification with a landscape can

even be expressed in such peripheral annotations.

In Western culture the classical and Christian traditions join, through

the Middle Ages and up to the Renaissance, in search of an earthly

paradise, and the conjectures about the existence of paradisiac islands

were frequent.47 These traditions, describing a state of harmony among

human beings and in the whole creation, acquired a political meaning

in the Renaissance, when the myths of Atlantis and of the Fortunate

Isles were welded into new utopian visions of society. Thomas More’s,

Tommaso Campanella’s and Francis Bacon’s utopias all take place on

islands.48 Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s state of nature is, according to

Delumeau, part of this cultural heritage (Delumeau 1992: 297).49

Some traces can also be found in Strindberg’s utopian essays in

Likt och Olikt50 (A Bit of Everything) from 1884. In ‘Om det Allmänna

Missnöjet, dess Orsaker och Botemedel’ (SV XVII: 9-83) (On the

General Discontent, Its Causes and Cures) the proposed solution of

the social issue can be summarized in a return to self-sufficient rural

villages, simpler living conditions and less demand for comforts and

consumption (Ciaravolo 2012c: 275-279). These ideas are based, as

the author reports, on his concrete experience of the rural and pastoral

Kymmendö, where the population typically combines agriculture,

fishing and hunting (SV XVII: 6951). In the same essay Strindberg

condemns the polluting steamboats (SV XVII: 66), i.e. the means of

transportation which actually allow his moving back-and-forth between

Stockholm and the islands. Here the writer seems to be more consistent

with his utopia than with his life experience.

Strindberg’s depiction of marital conflicts finds one of its settings

in the archipelago. In Dikter the family is for the poet, as we have

seen, an anchor against pessimism. The short story ‘Ett dockhem’52

(A Doll’s House) in the collection Giftas I (Getting Married I) – a story

and a collection that in many respect will determine a turning point

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in Strindberg’s career and life – is also an archipelago story in its first

part (SV XVI: 145-148), when the union between man and woman

appears as a paradisiac state before the Fall, i.e. before the knowledge

of Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House and its protagonist Nora (Meidal

2012: 138). Dalarö is the setting of a series of summers that unite

the protagonists, the captain and his wife, in a state of perfect bliss.

All the cherished ingredients are there, and they contribute to evoke

what Per Wästberg has termed, quoting the title of Luis Buñuel’s film

and with reference to the summer in the archipelago, ‘the discreet

charm of the bourgeoisie’53: guesthouse, veranda, white dresses,

white nights, sailing trips, freedom, nature, joy of the senses. When

the couple returns to Dalarö, after the problematic knowledge of Nora,

that environment has lost its magic (SV XVI: 153-157). The captain’s

revenge, when he proves to be a Real Man and conquers his wife again,

defeating Ottilia (his wife’s feminist friend) and Nora (the source of

evil), takes place at home in Stockholm (SV XVI: 157-161).

Strindberg’s most popular, fictional adaptation of his experience

on Kymmendö is the rural novel Hemsöborna54 from 1887. In the

writer’s intentions, and as an actual result, this work is an epic and

unbiased depiction, which neither argues in favour of or against

anything55; it does not even make modernity one of its main themes.

Nevertheless, as Lars Dahlbäck has indicated, the plot of the novel and

its protagonist’s progress reflect a sweeping historical development,

concentrating in three years a series of changes that required a much

longer process in reality, such as the modernization of agriculture,

a wider communication and transportation system, the impact of

summer guests and industrial exploitation on the natural environment

(Dahlbäck 1974: 44-45). In ‘Solrök’ we have seen the devastation

caused by the exploitation of feldspar. The fact that Carlsson, the

protagonist of Hemsöborna, negotiates with a German entrepreneur

about the same business, determines a turning point in the plot,

as Carlsson begins to experience how pride goes before a fall. The

entrepreneur is introduced by the professor, Carlsson’s summer guest

from Stockholm; and the steamboat where part of the deal takes

place becomes a social marker, as it belongs to the rich people from

town, who have come to exploit the area for industrial purposes; the

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steamboat is comically described as a foreign territory for Carlsson.56

On the whole, the sociologically precise encounters between rural

and urban life, and the spatial dimensions connected with them,

serve the form of comedy in Hemsöborna, without further intellectual

preoccupations.57 The commercial success of this novel contributed

to an even more widespread interest in the Stockholm archipelago

among the Swedish readers. In the perspectives of ethnology and

cultural history the novel is a mine of information, and its popular and

attractive form fostered a nostalgic feeling towards nature and rural

life. As Lars Dahlbäck and Björn Meidal have observed, Hemsöborna is

written from a summer guest’s point of view; the action is concentrated

in summer, while winters tend to pass quickly.58 Even as a bourgeois

novelist, then, Strindberg could act as an intermediary between the

wild and the civilized space, and as an advertiser of the wilderness.

The expectations were high when Strindberg finally wrote the

dramatic adaptation of Hemsöborna as a ‘folk comedy’.59 This play has

however not been successful, and has mainly been considered as a

weak drama since its first staging in 1889 (SV XXXII: 243-259). Gunnar

Ollén misses ‘the beautiful nature and the fresh archipelago air’ that

characterized the novel60, and this objection is recurring in the general

perception, which is interesting in terms of horizon of expectations.

Apart from impossible comparisons with the novel, which is a

masterpiece, we can observe Strindberg’s spatial solutions in the play,

as he is determined to convey the wide outdoor environment of the

archipelago within the never changing interior of Mrs. Flod’s cottage.

The ethnological richness is transferred indoors through all the visible

working tools and the characters’ strongly vernacular language. The

outside world is referred to in their speeches, and can be perceived

behind the cottage door and windows, through a summarizing, typical

panoramic view of the archipelago from above, since the cottage is

now located on top of a hill (SV XXXII: 11).61

The archipelago scenery is also exploited by Strindberg in Le

Playdoier d’un fou (En dåres försvarstal62 in Swedish translation; A

Madman’s Defence), the autobiographical novel written between 1887

and 1888 about the writer’s tormented love story and marriage with

Siri von Essen. Long passages set in the archipelago illustrate the

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initial phase of their relationship in order to make it more intense,

dramatic and picturesque. In summer 1875 the protagonist and

narrator, secretly in love with the baroness, accompanies her and her

husband from Stockholm through the archipelago to a bigger boat she

is taking to go to Finland. The torment of the separation is interwoven

here with the magic of the quiet, white night spent together, and the

following sunrise that makes the islands aflame with colour (SV XXV:

43-47). In the following autumn, the protagonist’s desperate attempt

to flee from Stockholm to France, away from this hopeless love, ends

at Dalarö. From the boat he recognizes the landscape that evokes

‘visions of beautiful summer days, memories from early years’63, and

he implores the captain to get off. Sweet memories of Kymmendö,

mixed with the staging of something that resembles a suicide in the

autumn weather, reflect the protagonist’s confused state of mind (SV

XXV: 82-98). In the third part of the novel, Kymmendö is mentioned

again when the protagonist describes what he calls ‘the high season of

my life’64: his breakthrough with the novel Röda Rummet in 1879, the

birth of his and Maria’s (Siri’s) first child in early 1880 and the first long

summer on Kymmendö as a family man. This happiness culminates in

‘[…] some months off from service, to live life in the wild with my

family on a greening island in the outer Stockholm archipelago’.65 The

greening island corresponds, in Strindberg’s personal mythology, to

the perception of the beauty of life as a husband and a father – in a

certain sense the peak of happiness and pure paradise on earth to

him.66

Strindberg’s knowledge of the nature, geography and society of

the archipelago, of the relations between it and the city, and between

the inner and outer archipelago, is displayed with variation and

richness in the ten stories of Skärkarlsliv. In this respect the already

analyzed introduction keeps its promises. In spite of this anchorage to

reality, however, Skärkarlsliv does not plead for democracy or social

commitment, no more than Hemsöborna did. We can even say that

Skärkarlsliv marks, as far as the representation of the archipelago is

concerned, the end of the democratic vision and the beginning of the

aristocratic one. Strindberg’s detachment from his own radical and

utopian ideas, which started in the aftermath of the Giftas issue, and

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continued in the autobiography Tjänstekvinnans son, is detectable

in the narrator’s distant, neutral, and at times even sceptical attitude

towards the popular subject matter in his stories. The social and

cultural differences, caught with subtlety, are seen with no hope or

desire for reform. Even in Skärkarlsliv different worlds meet and, to a

certain extent, mingle. In ‘Den romantiske klockaren på Rånö’ (SV XXVI:

17-70) the protagonist’s life connects the mainland (the small town of

Trosa), the capital town of Stockholm, a bigger island (Rånö) and the

outer skerries, where the hidden and traumatic past of the protagonist

is also concealed (Johannesson 1968: 109-120). Wilderness is no

more a positive marker as such; the archipelago can appear on the

contrary – in ‘Den romantiske klockaren på Rånö’ (SV XXVI: 59-68) as

well as in ‘En brottsling’ (A Criminal) (SV XXVI: 89-103) – as a miserable

social milieu where poverty fosters crime. Another interesting meeting

point between the urban and the rural sphere is described in ‘Min

sommarpräst’ (My Summer Priest) (SV XXVI: 71-78), where the narrator

and protagonist is a cultivated atheist from the city, who enjoys the

company of his friend the rural (and also cultivated) priest, with whom

he can quarrel and escape the crowd of other summer holiday makers.

The archipelago becomes again a peaceful oasis in Blomstermålningar

och djurstycken67 (Flower Paintings and Animal Pieces) from 1888, a

fascinating and nostalgic autobiographical book, where Strindberg

represents himself as a lover of nature, a hiker, a gardener, a fisher and

a hunter. The bliss of a quiet, white summer night in the archipelago

is evoked, with its almost sacred feeling of proximity to the elements

of the universe: the sky, the moon, the sun and the sea (SV XXIX: 194-

195). The archetype of Eden is even actualized in the description of

Strindberg’s garden on Kymmendö (SV XXIX: 219-225), where the writer

is finally conscious that he will never see that island again, since both

Hemsöborna and Skärkarlsliv have made him unwelcome (SV XXIX:

224). Even here, the preparations for the gardening and the purchase

of seeds take place in Stockholm, the urban point of departure (SV

XXIX: 219-220).

In 1890 Strindberg’s second archipelago novel I havsbandet68 is

characterized by the sharpest dissociation from his earlier democratic

radicalism. It is however also based on the description of Baltic herring

71


fishing in the Middle Ages, given some years before in the cultural

history Svenska Folket, as we have seen. The author’s standpoint

has now changed from popular and democratic to Nietzschean and

aristocratic. Such a change is also detectable in the spatial relations: in

and out, i.e. mainland and open sea, civilized town life and wilderness

on the islands, acquire opposite connotations, and account for the

author’s new world model. The opposition is no longer constriction

versus freedom, rotten society versus authenticity, but rather reason

and rules versus dumbness and lawlessness. The fishery inspector

Borg tries to teach updated fishing methods, but in vain, because the

fishers prove to be pariahs, who live a basic and almost animal life.

Skärkarlsliv introduced the motif of the skerries by the open sea as

a secluded place, where concealed crimes are committed, away from

legal social life; this motif is developed in I havsbandet. The tragic

thing about Borg is, however, that he neither belongs to the urban

and lawful society on the mainland or to the more disordered and

less constricted social life by the open sea. Rather, the small island

where he is living becomes a place of banishment and a prison for

him, and he literally does not know which direction to take, either in or

out.69 Contact with mankind becomes detestable, only nature is sacred

and desirable.70 The image of Borg’s pathological isolation reaches its

peak in chapter nine, when he enjoys sitting alone on an outer rock

surrounded by a thick fog (SV XXXI: 120-136).71 After that, only the

voluntary journey towards darkness remains. The remarkable beauty

of Strindberg’s Nietzschean, decadent and tragic novel consists also in

the fact that the natural elements are described with such delicacy. As

the narrator says at the beginning of the novel, this landscape leads

Borg back to the origins (SV XXXI: 34).72 This declaration of love is

expressed through Borg’s new aesthetics. His culture is urban; he is a

refined aesthete and a scientist at the same time.73 The combination

allows him to perceive the variety and beauty in the only apparently

simple nature of the islands and skerries by the open sea.

In a certain sense, the coastal area near Stockholm and the bigger

islands were conquered by the urban sphere as early as in the

seventeenth century, when the powerful Swedish nobility became the

owner of large estates and built manor houses and castles, especially

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in the southern archipelago (Hedenstierna 2000b: 9-10, 31). The

young Strindberg’s second encounter with the archipelago dates back

to 1867, when he worked as a private tutor for children belonging to

a noble family, and stayed with them at their estate to the south of

Dalarö (SV XX: 144-157). A similar setting, the Sandemar Castle near

Dalarö, is used in ‘En häxa’ (A Witch), a short story that takes place

in the seventeenth century. The protagonist Tekla, a social climber

from the lower class in Stockholm, happens to experience some days

of paradise at Sandemar, when she is invited by Ebba, a noblewoman

and friend of hers (SV XIV: 133-149). The boat trip from Stockholm

to Sandemar, described from Tekla’s perspective, accounts for the

captivating change of place, from the constricted urban room to the

natural paradise outside of it.

Between 1889 and 1891, when he is back in Sweden after his long

stay abroad, Strindberg spends some periods in the archipelago,

among other things to write I havsbandet. He wants to come back to

his landscape, but also hide himself. He is divorcing from Siri von Essen

and the children, and in his letters from Sandhamn and Runmarö, in

the spring of 1889, he evokes the summer paradise in a desperate

attempt to draw them there, reunite the family, and restore what has

irreparably fallen to pieces.74 Strindberg’s archipelago mythology

is developed even further in these vivid descriptions. In the short

story ‘Silverträsket’ (SV XXIX: 273-294) (The Silver Pond) published

first in 1898 but connected to the personal events of 1889-9075,

the protagonist’s psyche undergoes a process of dissolution in the

aftermath of the traumatic separation from his family, especially from

the children. The setting is an island in the archipelago, with its both

enchanting and disquieting nature. What could be a summer paradise

has turned to a sense of irremediable loss, and the protagonist’s

growing isolation from the human community reminds one of Borg in

I havsbandet (Lagercrantz 1986: 270-272).

While the process of divorce is going on, during winter 1890-91, both

Strindberg and his wife live on Värmdö, a bigger, inner island, but they

do not live together. The writer’s mood is gloomy, and the archipelago

appears now as the stage of a bourgeois drama; August and Siri, well-

known people in the capital, hide from the public eye to perform their

73


last act together. Yet they are not far from town, especially as the

wilderness of the inner archipelago is gradually becoming part of the

larger urban area of Stockholm.76

The interpretations of the myth of Eden during the Middle Ages often

wondered how long the blissful life of man and woman as a couple

really lasted. The assumptions varied, but it was common to think that

it lasted a short time. The shorter it lasted, the sharper the Fall, its

consequences and the yearning for the original state made themselves

felt.77 In his seminal book about Strindberg and the poetry of myth,

Harry G Carlson has given evidence of the author’s mythological

thinking, and of the mythopoetic layers we can find in his plays, both

historical and contemporary. Among these representations, the Fall

and the loss of Eden play an important role.78 On his own conditions,

Strindberg can adapt mythical patterns. The gloomier and more

melancholic archipelago, experienced during the divorce from Siri, can

be read as an actualization of the mythical lovers’ loss of Eden and

their Fall. This set of representations acquires an even more intense

character in connection with the writer’s third marriage to Harriet Bosse,

with its peculiar swings between bliss and desperation, paradise and

hell. Images of isolation, absurd waiting, imprisonment and shipwreck

become recurrent in Strindberg’s later production, and they also affect

the images of the archipelago, although the natural beauty of it never

stops nourishing the hope of happiness and redemption.

During his second marriage, to Frida Uhl, the Inferno Crisis and a

new long period abroad during the Nineties, Strindberg temporarily

lost touch with the archipelago; he came back, however, in 1899.

By the age of fifty he was, to be sure, still a controversial writer in

Sweden; but his canonization as a great national author, especially

as a playwright, had begun. He was celebrated and, for the first

time in his life, wealthy. The fashionable resort on Furusund, in the

northern archipelago, where Strindberg spent some summers from

1899, brought about a rich literary production.79 On 3 August 1899

Ockulta Dagboken (The Occult Diary) contains a simile between the

environment around the writer and Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim in

Palestine, situated one opposite the other and connected to curse and

to blessing in the Bible.80 From Furusund, with its luxuriant nature,

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Strindberg emphasizes the contrast with the barren and poorer Yxlan,

the island he could see on the opposite side of the bay, and with the

villages on it called Köpmanholm and Skarmsund. On the fictional

level, Furusund becomes Fagervik (Fairhaven), while Köpmanholm

and Skarmsund become Skamsund (Foulstrand). The Fagervik-and-

Skamsund motif is found in the play Ett drömspel (A Dream Play)

from 1902, in the collection of short stories Fagervik och Skamsund

(Fairhaven and Foulstrand), also from 1902, and in the collection of

poems Ordalek och småkonst (Word Play and Minor Art), published in

two versions in 1902 and 1905. The writer’s experience on Furusund

is an inspiration also for the play Dödsdansen I-II (The Dance of Death

I-II) from 1901, the novel Götiska Rummen (Gothic Rooms) from 1904,

and the short novel Taklagsöl (The Roofing Feast) from 1907.

The Fagervik-and-Skamsund complex is full of elements taken from

the observed reality, which are of great interest from the historical

and sociological point of view. Thanks to biographical research – but,

before that, thanks to the autobiographical space Strindberg himself

has created through his letters and diaries and through his whole way

of staging his literary work as experienced life81 – we gain a better

understanding of the process by which reality is remoulded into the

peculiar post-Inferno literary universe, often taking on a visionary and

dream-like quality. Fagervik and Skamsund become, in such a way, the

terms of a symbolic opposition, through which the author can give

his motif of summer paradise in the archipelago a gloomier and more

problematic turn: human misery and unhappiness are also found on

the sunny side, and behind the smart façade of upper class vacation

rites.

What is specific about Dödsdansen82, with reference to the setting,

is that this family drama takes place on an island, apparently on what

we have called the sunny side, but actually in a bourgeois interior that

conveys the idea of cage and claustrophobia (Wirmark 1989: 58-61,

65). The outdoor environment is hinted at in the stage directions and

by the characters’ words, and perceived at a distance through the

windows and the veranda. It is as if the paradisiac promises that the

place would allow in theory, are contradicted and denied, sometimes

with a form of black humour. Captain Edgar refers to the myths of

75


classical antiquity and the Bible in the second part of the play, when

he mentions the Fortunate Isles and Paradise, comparing them to his

‘little hell’, i.e. his life on the island and his indissoluble love-hate

relationship with his wife Alice (SV XLIV: 158-159).83 This form of

misanthropic cynicism characterizes Edgar, who can define his island

‘a community of idiots’.84 In Dödsdansen the island is an anti-utopia: a

place of banishment and a retirement post for people who are suffering

failures and shipwrecks, especially marital ones. Even the surrounding

sea and the shores are described as unpleasant by the characters (SV

XLIV: 151, 209). Kurt – Alice’s cousin, the couple’s old friend, and the

third pole in the triangle – is the new quarantine master on the island,

a job that is connected with banishment and suffering, and a symbolic

role that will be developed in Ett drömspel and Fagervik och Skamsund.

The spatial relations are an interesting aspect in Dödsdansen.

Edgar’s intrigues imply his restless moving between the island and the

city; and when Kurt dreams of a love affair with Alice, he invites her to

go to town that same day – in just one hour, he says, and maybe go to

the theatre, she adds.85 It is true, as Wirmark observes, that neither the

name of the island or that of the city are mentioned, but it is not true

that we do not know how long it takes to reach the town by steamboat.86

Wirkmark gives priority to an allegorical, mythical and metaphysical

reading of Dödsdansen, whereby the geographical, historical and

social elements of it are played down, if not denied (Wirkmark 1989:

80-85, 92-95). Yet, I argue, the contexts depicted in the text indicate

Stockholm and its archipelago. Using the steamboat, the telephone

and the telegraph becomes a leitmotif in this play, where observed

reality and nightmarish atmospheres mingle. It also illustrates the

circumstance that living permanently in the archipelago was possible

for the well-off bourgeoisie of Stockholm at the turn of the century,

and that the technical improvements in the communication system

allowed an even high standard of comfort.

In the second part of the play there is a possible opening in the

claustrophobic space, expressed in the love story between the young

couple Judith and Allan. It is summertime now, and markers of the

vacation atmosphere enjoyed by the upper class, such as tennis

rackets, white dresses and parasols, can occasionally enter the cage-

76


like interior (SV XLIV: 143, 154).

A section of the dream in Ett drömspel takes place at Skamsund and

Fagervik, named as such for the first time.87 After the claustrophobic

marriage scene in a town flat, featuring the Daughter and the Lawyer,

the Officer has taken the Daughter to the seaside. Skamsund, the

unlucky place, is the first station of their journey (SV XLVI: 54-65), with

Fagervik, the lucky place, appearing on the background of the bay;

then the positions are inverted when they visit Fagervik (SV XLVI: 65-

67, 71-79). In Ett drömspel stage directions are detailed, as they must

describe with precision the transformations in the image flow of the

dream. The seaside scenery appears however stylized and universal

rather than realistic and local: it is the archipelago, yet it could be any

seaside locality.88

Furusund used to be a quarantine station before becoming a seaside

and health resort where people could, among other things, take mud

baths.89 Such historical circumstances are integrated in a fundamental

leitmotif running through the play: the symbolic interaction of the

elements Earth, Water, Air and Fire. Air and water is what the scenery

at the bay between Fagervik and Skamsund mainly consists of;

furthermore, water and fire give steam in the quarantine station, and

mud is a mixture of earth and water. The Poet, i.e. the Daughter’s third

male partner, is introduced here: as he tends to be too ethereal, he

needs a mud bath every now and then, to restore balance. Although

the quarantine station was on Furusund (i.e. Fagervik), it is placed in

Skamsund in the play, because of the symbolic opposition Strindberg

needs in his literary universe. The sphere of the quarantine station

includes sickness, suffering, absurd waiting and seclusion. The

Quarantine Master – who already appeared in Dödsdansen through

Kurt – is in close touch with this sphere, and his job is in itself a form

of banishment.

The terms of the opposition between Fagervik and Skamsund in Ett

drömspel indicate that although human suffering can be caused by

social injustice, it is found across the social divide. The polyphony of

suffering in the play accounts for a universal condition, including the

sunny and elegant resort. Even here many dream-like details are based

on Strindberg’s real experience of Furusund: the Italian (i.e. Italianate)

77


villas, the masquerade, the clubhouse with its dance and music, the

ugly upper class girl who does not participate in the dance, and finally

the rich blind man who is the owner of it all. Strindberg’s in many

respects happy reunion with the archipelago is thus included, under

particular conditions, in his pessimistic masterpiece about mankind’s

suffering.

To the existential perspective in Ett drömspel a decidedly social

perspective is added by those stories in Fagervik och Skamsund that

are set in the archipelago.90 As it happens in Skärkarlsliv, a preface

offers a skillfully constructed stage direction, a spatial and social

description that lays the ground for the stories (SV L: 115-117). It

defines the opposition between the poorer and popular Skamsund

and the richer and bourgeois Fagervik, whereby the narrator tends,

this time, to adopt Skamsund’s point of view. The local population on

Skamsund consists mainly of pilots and pietists, whereas the summer

guests from Stockholm dominate in Fagervik. The paradisiac vision

of Fagervik, where ‘everything seems to be arranged for the three-

month-long feast called summer’91, is seductive for the less privileged

islanders, like the boy Torkel in ‘En Barnsaga’ (SV L: 118-152) (A Fairy

Tale), and the three servant girls in ‘De Yttersta och de Främsta’ (SV L:

275-278) (The Last and the First Ones), but this seduction is deceptive,

according to the pietists’ (and the narrator’s) way of looking at the

fortunate island (SV L: 126-127, 278).

In 'En Barnsaga' the adopted perspective is Skamsund’s. Through

it a social stance and a clear solidarity with the lower classes make

themselves heard. The story of the protagonist Torkel is one of poverty

and deprivation, and to his eyes Fagervik is almost an unreal dream,

the manifestation of an inaccessible Eden (SV L: 126). He dreams of

reaching Fagervik one day, although a pietist on Skamsund reminds

him of Ebal and Gerizim. In this story everything is based on the

opposition, spatial, social, cultural and ideological, between the two

localities. When Torkel has managed to get to the other side of the bay,

in order to work as a servant, he is at first fascinated by the charm of

the Stockholm bourgeoisie on vacation in the skärgård: white dresses,

beautiful young people, clubhouse, music, fireworks, leisure and life

as uninterrupted feast. His perspective changes, however, when he

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happens to be treated unjustly. He realizes, then, that he is and will

remain a servant. A feeling of social revolt makes him see the dirt

and misery behind the attractive façade – in the typical Strindbergian

unmasking manner we know from many works, the servant Jean in

Fröken Julie (Miss Julie) being maybe the best known example. In the

end Torkel becomes a sailor, leaving both Fagervik and Skamsund

behind.

Pietism is historically important for the culture and identity of the

population of the archipelago. Strindberg has already used this trait

in Skärkarlsliv and I havsbandet. The pietists, assiduous Bible readers

(they are called läsare, readers, in Swedish), can use the archetypes

of the holy text to distinguish deceptive seduction from authentic

redemption (Ebal versus Gerizim). Strindberg, quite differently from

what he did in I havsbandet (where pietism was part of the pariahs’

culture that Borg despised), now shows an appreciative attitude towards

Skamsund’s religious perspective. A chord of sorrow, pessimism and, at

times, misanthropy is thus struck amid the mythical summer paradise,

undermining the illusion of happiness cherished in Fagervik’s sphere.

Through this chord Strindberg can in part also return, with a circular

movement, to his own cultural roots: pietism, Søren Kierkegaard and

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and, consequently, to his old social pathos.

The dialogue and confrontation about pietism between the

quarantine master and his friend, the post master, in the preface to

‘Karantänmästarns Berättelser’ (SV L: 153-163) indicates the tendency

in the book. According to the quarantine master the humble pietists

teach us to pay more attention to the deep existential questions, and

to become more spiritual. This anti-materialism, as part of a personal

Christian belief, is an important element in Strindberg’s post-Inferno

production. The story of the quarantine master, and of the protagonist

in ‘Den kvarlåtne’ (SV L: 279-282) (The Man Left Behind), show also

that Skamsund, ‘Gerizim’, can be chosen by people who come from

the mainland and want to withdraw from the world, either to hide their

misery, or because they loathe the constrictions of urban life, its social

ambition and useless luxury; they are therefore, in spite of everything,

happy with the purportedly cursed place they live in.

The collection of poems Ordalek och småkonst was first included

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as a section in Fagervik och Skamsund, and then, in a revised and

enlarged edition, published independently in 1905.92 According to

Gunnar Ollén it is the culmination for Strindberg as a poet.93 It is

undoubtedly so, also for its perception of space. The urban room is

often represented as atmospheric, including the air and the clouds.

A vertical gaze can establish connections between the streets and the

buildings at the lower level and the sky above, i.e. between mankind’s

imprisoned and suffering condition and its yearning for liberation and

flight. The air and the drifting clouds can also connect near and far

horizontally. The urban poet’s thoughts and imagination can drift with

them, and one of their cherished destinations is towards the East,

just beyond the woods and to the sea, the islands and the skerries.94

Geographically they are close to the urban space, yet they appear far

away, or better, in another place, buried in the past like a lost paradise,

with their promise of love, regeneration and happiness, a vanished

time that can only resist as memory and bittersweet nostalgia, as in the

poem ‘Vid dagens slut’ (SV LI: 91-92) (At the End of the Day), and in the

sequence ‘Moln-Bilder’ (Cloud Formations), where we find a homage to

the ‘greening island’, seen in a dream. Whether Kymmendö or a mix of

the islands Strindberg lived on, this greening place defines the space

of the archipelago with its connotations of lost paradise: a utopian

state of bliss and harmony where children embrace one another in

peace and love (SV LI: 100-102).

The long poem ‘Trefaldighetsnatten’ (SV LI: 121-158) (The Night

Before Trinity Sunday), may take us by surprise, for its idyllic and naïve

praise of summer joy in the archipelago (Ollén 1941: 43-44). Through

its epic and dramatic form, the celebration of summer becomes

collective, polyphonic and ritual95, and it develops as a harmonic

dialogue and confrontation between the summer guests arriving from

town and the local population on the island, which is again Fagervik.

Rites are ways of performing shared and fundamental representations

in a community; and all the cherished details of what made summer

in Strindberg’s archipelago paradisiac are evoked: arriving with the

steamboat, gardening, fishing, cottages, crayfish, tennis, clubhouse,

opera at the summer theatre, skittle alley, white nights and even its

mosquitos, and finally the beauty of nature all around. In this way,

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the occurrence of a Christian feast coincides with the celebration of

Swedish summer and of the sacredness of nature.

A similar naïve tone characterizes Sagor (1903) (Fairy Tales). But

even when Strindberg adopts the form of the fairy tale, he does

not renounce to some realistic connotations of the archipelago

environment in summer, as a seaside resort for the Stockholmers. In

‘I midsommartider’ (SV LII: 85-95) (In Midsummertime) – reminiscent

of the simple form of the folktale, but also of Novalis’ visionary,

dream-like, metaphysical and Christian conception of Märchen – the

magic beauty of nature resembles paradise in such a way that the final

vision of ‘a greening island’ belongs to heaven rather than to earth.

The celebration of Swedish summer and the perspective of Christian

redemption are thus joined. ‘Blåvinge finner Guldpudran’ (SV LII: 195-

202) (Bluewing Finds the Golden Saxifrage) is a fairy tale for children

that intriguingly mixes the folktale with Andersen’s fairy tale, Linnaeus,

and the real story of Furusund as a fashionable seaside resort. As the

little girl manages to find the plant indicating the presence of drinkable

water, the island can happily, in the final perspective of the fairy tale,

be transformed in a seaside resort. It is, in a certain sense, a founding

myth of Strindberg’s Furusund (Persson 2004: 236-237).

We return to a gloomier atmosphere in the novel Götiska Rummen96,

published in 1904. It deals among other things with a divorce, and

combines the author’s memories of Värmdö in winter, during his

first divorce (Brandell 1985: 259), with those of Furusund, with its

clubhouse and the fashionable life around it. For this reason the

archipelago appears both white and icy and in its green summer

version. Götiska Rummen is particularly interesting in our perspective,

because it can neither be considered a pure archipelago novel nor a

pure Stockholm novel. The protagonists belong to a family of urban

professionals and intellectuals, who can choose at any time of the year

to dwell either in town or on the (fictional) inner island of Storö (Big

Island). Thanks to the steamboats, the newspapers and the telephone,

the characters are constantly, as it were, connected; the place where

they are staying does not change their social functions as Stockholm

professionals and intellectuals. The novel shows that it was possible,

by the turn of the century, to live at only half an hour’s distance from

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Stockholm, while being at the same time in a borderland where the

wilderness began. It witnesses therefore a historical change during the

last two decades of the nineteenth century, when the environments

of Stockholm and its archipelago tended to come closer and, to a

certain extent, merge. This sociological dimension gets tinged with the

existential one in the novel, for example when the narrator – adopting

his characters’ point of view from the steamboat going to the islands

– bitterly underscores how the archipelago, near the big town and at

the same time sufficiently distant from it, represents a retirement post

for people who have suffered marital shipwrecks or personal failures

of other kinds:

Brygga följde på brygga, och vid varje tillägg hade man tillfälle

att slunga en anmärkning, en upplysning om innebyggarne. Där

voro liksom reträttplatser, ibland gömställen för människor som

dragit sig undan världsvimlet. Den ena sagan var inte lik den

andra, och i denna ödemark, en halv timme från Stockholm hade

de satt sig ner, mest kanske för att känna närheten av havet,

det enda stora som Sveriges gnetiga natur bjöd på. Alldagliga

sorgespel hade utspelats, och man gjorde sista akten härute.

Förstörda förmögenheter, brutna familjeöden, felsteg, straffade

eller ostraffade, äregirighetens sår, sorg och saknad, allt elände

hade här slagit sig ner i gröna dalkjusor mellan gråstensknallar.

De invigde som passerade denna vattenväg kände sig defilera

förbi all livets bitterhet, och jämsides med beklämingen väcktes

ett välbehag över att vara utanför. (SV LIII: 33)

(Jetty followed after jetty, and at each new landing one had the

opportunity to drop a remark, a piece of information about

the inhabitants. Something like retirement posts were there,

at times hiding-places for people who had withdrawn from

the world crowd. One story did not resemble the other, and in

this wilderness, half an hour from Stockholm, they had settled,

perhaps mostly to feel the proximity to the sea, the only big

thing offered by Sweden’s scanty nature. Everyday tragedies had

taken place, and the last act was performed out here. Destroyed

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fortunes, broken family destinies, false steps, punished or

unpunished, wounds of ambition, sorrow and regret, all the

misery had settled down in green small valleys among granite

rocks. The initiated who passed through this waterway felt all the

bitterness of life march past, and alongside with the oppression,

a relish arose for being outside of it.)

Even agriculture in the archipelago is, in this novel, considered from

a more problematic angle, far from the pastoral tone it is possible

to find in the essays of Likt och Olikt or in Hemsöborna. Sometimes

agriculture does not pay off, as in the case of Anders, one of the

protagonists’ sons (SV LIII: 70-81, 111-115); and sometimes it pays

off all too well, as in the case of the priest and diary manager on the

island, which gives Strindberg the opportunity of a biting and funny

anticlerical satire (SV LIII: 57-62).

Sorrow and regret characterize the perspective of the protagonist

and narrator in Taklagsöl97, a story that is again related to a painful

process of familiar separation. During a long, modernistic internal

monologue on his deathbed98, the protagonist recalls among other

things two important and simultaneous events that took place in the

archipelago the summer of the year before: the short reunion with

his wife and their little son, and the reconciliation with his relatives.

In his flashback, the strongly ritual elements in the Stockholm upper

class’ celebration of summer coincide with the revelation of a mythical,

short-lived paradisiac harmony, as ‘[i]n that moment I experienced two

minutes, preserved in my mind as truly corresponding to the images

of the Fortunate Isles and peace on earth’.99

The moment of bliss, intertwined with a fundamental feeling of

loss, and with the persistent reality of an everyday inferno lurking all

around, is summarized in ‘Hägringar’ (Mirages), a text in En Blå Bok I

(A Blue Book I), published in 1907. Here the ‘greening island’ appears

again:

Vi hålla av varandra på ett högre plan, men kunna icke vara i samma

rum, och vi drömma om ett återseende, dematerialiserade, på

en grönskande ö, där endast vi två få finnas och på sin höjd

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vårt barn. Jag minns en halvtimme, då vi tre verkligen gingo

hand i hand på en grönskande ö i havsstranden, och då fick jag

intrycket att det var himlen. Så ringde middagsklockan, och vi

voro åter på jorden och straxt därpå i helvetet.100

(We love each other on a higher level, but we cannot be in the

same room; and we dream of a reunion, dematerialized, on

a greening island, where only the two of us, or our child at

most, are allowed to stay. I remember half an hour when the

three of us really walked hand in hand along the sea shore of

a greening island, and there I got the impression that it was

heaven. Then the dinner bell rang, and we were again on earth,

and immediately afterwards in hell.)

Delumeau distinguishes between the history of our looking for

an earthly paradise from the history of the hope for a perfect and

everlasting joy in heaven (Delumeau 1992: 7-8). It seems as if the two

perspectives can merge for Strindberg in his later years, as Meidal

has observed (Meidal 2012: 83-86). In the above quoted passage

from En Blå Bok I, the greening island is a place we can still locate in

this life of ours, yet it inspires the vision of a possible dematerialized

life to come. It is interesting to observe how Strindberg even tried to

visualize the soul’s state after death, before its final destination, as

a stage located on an island and in an archipelago, in what Martin

Kylhammar calls ‘the heavenly pastoral’ (1985: 115-120). The visions

of an ethereal, higher world, inspired by the painter Arnold Böcklin

and by Emanuel Swedenborg, are found in the dramatic fragment

‘Toten-Insel (Hades)’101 – Isle of the Dead (Hades) – written in 1907,

in the fragment ‘Armageddon. Början till En Roman’102 (Armageddon.

Beginning of a Novel), written in 1907 and published in 1908, and in

the short prose text ‘Högre Existensformer; Die Toteninsel’103 (Higher

Forms of Existence; The Isle of the Dead) from 1908. These visions are

however part of another story, a story that, because of its immutability,

was difficult to tell even for Strindberg.104

From his nonreligious, humanistic, meditative and ironic standpoint,

the writer Werner Aspenström, who was for many years a summer

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guest in the same house that Strindberg had rented on Kymmendö,

has formulated some important thoughts about our contradictory,

modern longing for natural paradise. He tends to interpret the quoted

passage from En Blå Bok I as a reminder of our paradise as earthly,

green and precarious, when he writes: ‘The word paradise derives from

an Old Persian one, which means ring-wall. Isles have not seldom had

to replace the fenced gardens of the Golden Age. As to banishment, we

practice it by ourselves, since the gods have died’.105

Strindberg’s authorship can show consistency in spite of its

contradictions. His metaphysical stance, interwoven with the epiphany

of an earthly paradise, and within the persistent consciousness of a

tormenting life, unites the examined passages in Tjänstekvinnans

son and En Blå Bok I. In both passages the Stockholm archipelago is

a material that is transformed in literature and myth. Since life and

literature are so intertwined in Strindberg, it is inevitable that we,

through him, come near a personal and almost private mythology,

which only seems to have to do with him and his closest relatives. As

I have tried to show, however, Strindberg’s personal voice offers an

adaptation of traditional mythical patterns in Western culture; at the

same time he partakes in a collective narrative about a paradise made

of islands, shaped while Stockholm is becoming a modern big city.

The archipelago reached from Stockholm by the steamboats forms,

as Lagercrantz has observed, a home scenery as well as an image

of the golden age of the bourgeoisie, to which Strindberg always

returns (Lagercrantz 1986: 13-14). Also Lotman admits that the space

chosen by writers may coincide with their familiar landscape (Lotman

1972: 273-274), but he looks at the spatial relations from another

angle, as a structural function of the literary text, even beyond their

biographical contents, or their correspondence to a real geography.

I argue that both perspectives are needed to shed light on the topic

I have chosen to discuss, because we do not diminish the poetic and

literary dimensions of Strindberg’s transformation if we, at the same

time, look at it in terms of cultural history, as an expression of a

collective myth-making by the population of Stockholm from the last

decades of the nineteenth century up to present time. Strindberg’s

creation belongs to the pioneering phase of this construction, started

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by the upper middle class, and by now part of both high and popular

Swedish culture. As Selander and Wästberg argue, Strindberg discovers

the nature of the archipelago not only for himself but for the Swedish

people.106 More than anyone else, he was before his time as a modern

man, with his capability of consciously embodying the contradictions

of modernity. His longing for the lost paradise is ours, but a unique

power of creation belongs to him.

Notes

1 The English titles of Strindberg’s works follow Michael Robinson (2009: xxxii-xxxvi). When titles of works, or parts of works, do not appear in Robinson’s list, translations are mine.2 Compare Sten Selander, ‘Förord and Stockholms skärgård’, in Selander 1954: 7-32; Erik Ljungberger, ‘Badorter och sommargäster i Stockholms skärgård’ in Selander 1954: 343-368; Grönblad 1970: 7-8, 162-163; Wästberg 1973: 51-53, 58, 113-114; Hedenstierna 2000a: 5-6, 42-55; and Hedenstierna 2000b: 54-55.3 See Lotman 1977: 217-232; Lotman 1990: 199-241; and Marchese 2009: 101-127.4 The instability of meaning, character and human identity is discussed in Eric O. Johannesson’s seminal book about Strindberg’s novels; see Johannesson 1968: 1-24.5 Strindberg’s realism is repeatedly underscored in Berendsohn 1962, for example p. 70-72.6 See in particular Barthes 1957: 7-8, 213-268.7 See Rasmusson 2010, who mentions a general change of orientation among Stockholmers during Strindberg’s lifetime, from an interest in lake Mälaren, with its islands and bays, to a new interest in the wild seascape of the skärgård.8 See in particular Wästberg 1973: 9-49; and Hedenstierna 2000a: 29-55. An interesting documentation is also given in Eklund / Sjöberg 1983.9 See Wästberg 1973: 54, 59, 109; and Hedenstierna 2000b: 10-12.10 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, XX, Tjänstekvinnans son I-II, red. H. Lindström, Stockholm 1989: 147-148. I will henceforth indicate each volume of the Samlade Verk edition in the footnote, whenever it is mentioned for the first time. The references are subsequently given as the abbreviation SV plus the number of the volume and the pages. In the Works Cited only the complete edition is reported. All translations are mine.11 Meidal 2012: 16-17. The role of steamboats in Strindberg’s family tradition is underscored in Lagercranz 1986: 12-14, and Meidal 2012: 20-21. I want to thank professor Björn Meidal for his interest in my project about Strindberg and the archipelago, and for his suggestions.12 Lagercrantz 1986: 26-27.13 The Swedish word for bay is fjärd, a term that is part of the archipelago

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environment, etymologically related to the more internationally known Norwegian fjord. 14 SV XX: 148: ‘Nu var han där i paradiset’ (Now he was there in paradise).15 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, XXVI, Skärkarlsliv, red. N. Å. Sjöstedt, Stockholm 1984: 7-15.16 SV XXVI: 10: ‘[…] omväxling av dystert och leende, av fattigt och rikt, av täckt och vilt, av inland och havskust’.17 See Berendsohn 1962: 25-27 and 29-31.18 Let us not forget, though, that Strindberg had left the archipelago and Sweden in 1883, and that he, after returning to his home country in 1889, was astonished by the material progress that had taken place in the meantime.19 See Strindberg’s autobiography, with further manifestations of the archipelago motif: SV XX: 328-329; and Strindberg, Samlade Verk, vol. XXI, Tjänstekvinnans son III-IV, red. H. Lindström, Stockholm 1996: 23, 29, 64-77.20 Roland Barthes dedicates one chapter of Mythologies to the writer on vacation. The writer’s splendid uniqueness consists in the fact that he does not stop producing although he is on vacation. If the bourgeois ideology allows the writer to have a false job, he must then have a false vacation too. See Barthes 1957: 29-31.21 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, II, I vårbrytningen, red. C. R. Smedmark, Stockholm 1981: 7-32. See Meidal 2003, and Meidal 2012: 66-67.22 As to the role and history of Dalarö see Wästberg 1973: 54-58; and Hedenstierna 2000b: 129-132.23 SV II: 14: ‘[...] jag hatar detta stadsliv utflyttat på landet’.24 Strindberg spent the autumn of 1873 in Sandhamn, on Sandö, in an attempt to become a telegrapher and escape from literary failures and monetary troubles in Stockholm. See SV XXI: 80-85. As to the role and history of Sandhamn see Hedenstierna 2000b: 64-65. 25 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, IV, Ungdomsjournalistik, red. H. Sandberg, Stockholm 1991: 75-79; first published in Dagens Nyheter, 4.9.1872.26 SV IV: 80-81; first published in Dagens Nyheter, 4.12.1873.27 SV II: 42-49; first published in Dagens Nyheter, 2.7.1874.28 Compare Sehlstedt 1961; Sten Selander, ‘Skärgården i litteraturen’, in Selander 1954: 446-447; and Grönblad 1970: 60-61, 68-69.29 SV IV: 82: ‘[...] en fetisch som vördas mer än Gud, ett begrepp som saknar verklighet, men dock är så verkligt som något kan vara’; first published in Dagens Nyheter, 6.12.1873. As to these early anarchistic tendencies, also in connection with the archipelago environment, see Edqvist 1961: 91-94.30 SV II: 54-72; first published in the weekly magazine ‘Svalan’, 8, 15 and 22.5.1875.31 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, VI, Röda Rummet, red. C. R. Smedmark, Stockholm 1981: 258-267. See Brandell 1987: 178-179. As to Falk’s position in the novel see Johannesson 1968: 25-45.32 About Strindberg and Kymmendö see Jirlow 1945; Persson 2004: 160-182; Lindberg / Utter Wahlströhm 2007: 30-44; and Meidal 2012: 83-86.

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33 Brandell 1987: 93-97, in particular p. 95.34 Strindberg, Brev, II, 1877-mars 1882, Utgivna av T. Eklund, Stockholm 1950: 166: ‘[...] jag är Jean Jacques’ intime när det gäller återgången till Naturen [...]’. Henceforth shortened as B II. In the Works Cited only the complete edition is reported. Strindberg’s anarchistic letters to Edvard Brandes are examined in Edqvist 1961: 152-162. 35 B II: 267: ‘[...] jag tror endast [...] på en pånyttfödelse genom återgången till naturen – städernas upphäfvande – statens upplösande i byalag utan öfverhufvud [...]’. 36 I have discussed these aspects in Ciaravolo 2011, Ciaravolo 2012b and Ciaravolo 2012c.37 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, IX, Svenska Folket I, red. C. Kretz / P. Stam, Stockholm 2001: 142-150.38 In his autobiography Jag. En bok om och på gott och ont, originally published in 1931, Carl Larsson has given a vivid description of the time he spent with Strindberg on Kymmendö, and of their work for Svenska Folket. See Larsson 1992: 82-86. Strindberg’s first literary discovery of Huvudskären and their seasonal herring fishing occurs even before Svenska Folket, during a glorious sailing trip described in ‘Huruledes jag fann Sehlstedt’, SV II: 43-45.39 Through the expression ‘experience of modernity’ I refer to Marshal Berman’s seminal and for me deeply influential study; see Berman 1988.40 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, XIII, Svenska öden och äventyr I, red. B Landgren, Stockholm 1981: 48-65.41 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, XV, Dikter på vers och prosa. Sömngångarnätter på vakna dagar och strödda tidiga dikter, red. J. Spens, Stockholm 1995: 73-98.42 This circumstance appears clearly also in the autobiography, when Strindberg describes the composition of Mäster Olof on Kymmendö. See SV XXI: 29.43 See Edqvist 1961: 234.44 See Ciaravolo 2012a, and Ciaravolo 2012b.45 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, XVIII, Kvarstadsresan, Fabler och Societeten i Stockholm samt andra prosatexter 1880-1889, red. C. Svensson, Stockholm 2009: 71-107.46 SV XVIII: 81: ‘[...] icke öar med apelsiner, lagerbärsträd och marmorpalats, utan små knottriga gnejsknallar med taggiga granar och röda stugor [...]’. A similar opposition between the Mediterranean area and the archipelago will be developed in an episode of the novel I havsbandet (By the Open Sea) from 1890; see Strindberg, Samlade Verk, XXXI, I havsbandet, red. H. Lindström, Stockholm 1982: 88-89, 96-100, and 114-119.47 See Delumeau 1992: 11-35, 59-97, and 129-152.48 See Delumeau 1992: 111 and 157-158.49 A satirical adaptation of the international utopian model is found in Strindberg’s story ‘De lycksaliges Ö’ (The Fortunate’s Isle), published in 1884 and completed in 1890 for the series Svenska öden och äventyr. Utopia is not, however, set in the Stockholm archipelago, but on an imaginary island in the Atlantic or Caribbean. See Strindberg, Samlade Verk, XIV, Svenska öden och

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äventyr II, red. B. Landgren, Stockholm 1990: 41-89.50 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, XVII, Likt och Olikt I-II samt uppsatser och tidningsartiklar 1884-1890, red. H. Lindström, Stockholm 2003. 51 With reference to the same utopian program see also the essays ‘Livsglädjen’(The Joy of Living), SV XVII: 84, and ‘Kulturarbetets överskattning ‘(The Overestimation of Cultural Work), SV XVII: 101.52 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, XVI, Giftas I-II, red. U. Boëthius, Stockholm 1982: 145-161.53 Wästberg 1973: 129: ‘[...] borgerlighetens diskreta charm [...]’.54 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, XXIV, Hemsöborna, red. C. Kretz / H. Söderström, Stockholm 2012.55 See Johannesson 1968: 82-90, and L. Dahlbäck 1974: 45-49.56 SV XXIV: 111-119. Lars Dahlbäck analyzes the geographical and social relations – between Hemsö and Dalarö, and Hemsö and Stockholm – with great accuracy, also in terms of confrontation between opposite world models; see L. Dahlbäck 1974: 157-163, 205, 224-235.57 In his reading of the pastoral theme in Strindberg’s oeuvre Martin Kylhammar argues, however, that Hemsöborna pleads for agriculture on a small scale against the rules of capitalistic profit. See Kylhammar 1985: 61-62.58 Dahlbäck 1974: 45; Meidal 2012: 198. Dahlbäck refers also to the Swedish scholars who have pointed out this aspect before, starting from Fredrik Böök in 1923. See Dahlbäck 1974, note 65: 337-338.59 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, XXXII, Folk-komedin Hemsöborna. Himmelrikets nycklar, red. G. Ollén, Stockholm 1987: 7-124.60 Ollén 1949: 94: ‘[...] romanens ram av skön natur och frisk skärgårdsluft [...]’. 61 See also the negative assessment in Ollén 1982: 185: ‘Dessutom är det svårt att med en fonddekoration på en teater söka ersätta den förälskade naturskildring som spelar en så stor roll i romanen.’ (Besides, it is difficult to try to replace, with a backdrop in a theatre, the enchanted depiction of nature that plays such a big part in the novel). Ollén 1982 is the revised edition of Ollén 1949.62 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, XXV, En dåres försvarstal, red. G. Rossholm, Stockholm 1999.63 SV XXV: 86: ‘[…] syner av vackra sommardagar, minnen från tidiga ungdomsår’.64 SV XXV: 196: ‘[...] högsäsongen i mitt liv [...]’.65 SV XXV: 196-197: ‘[...] några månaders tjänstledighet för att leva vildmarksliv med min familj på en grönskande ö i Stockholms yttre skärgård’. 66 As Meidal observes (2012: 105), ‘den grönskande ön’ as a paradise on earth appears already at the end of the fairy play Lycko-Pers resa, written in 1881-82; see Strindberg, Samlade Verk, XI, Tidiga 80-talsdramer, red. T. Nilsson, Stockholm 2001: 265.67 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, XXIX, Vivisektioner. Blomstermålningar och djurstycken. Skildringar av naturen. Silverträsket, red. H. Lindström, Stockholm 1985, 165-225.68 See note 46.

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69 Tobias Dahlkvist (2012) argues that the Nietzschean trait in Borg is above all to be found in his frailty and modern nervousness, i.e., in the concept of the décadent rather than in that of the Übermensch. 70 In this respect I do not fully agree with Kylhammar, who argues that Borg’s project consists in the instrumental manipulation of nature, considered as an enemy (1985: 75-84). As Haverty Rugg (2012) has suggested, there is a clear environmental perspective in Borg’s consciousness.71 See Johannesson 1968: 146-171, in particular p. 154-155 and 164.72 According to Johannesson’s psychological reading, this return to the origin, and Borg’s final voluntary death at sea, represent a reunion with the Mother and with the primordial realm of the unconscious; see Johannesson 1968: 167-170.73 Kärnell 1962: 211-233, proposes an illuminating comparison between Hemsöborna and I havsbandet as to the way images are used. In the earlier novel an ‘organic’ choice of metaphors prevails, since images are mostly taken from the semantic field of rural life and everyday occupations on the island. In the later novel, on the contrary, the similes indicate the protagonist’s sophisticated and intellectual approach, his wider perspectives, and his isolation among the islanders.74 Strindberg, Brev, VII, februari 1888-december 1889, Utgivna av T. Eklund, Stockholm 1961: 313, 316-321. See Brandell 1985: 231-236.75 Berendsohn 1962: 186-190; and Persson 2004: 201-216.76 Strindberg also lived on Dalarö in August 1891 and the whole summer of 1892. Although the play Leka med elden (Playing with Fire) from 1892 takes place at a seaside resort, and is inspired by the author’s experiences on Dalarö in 1891, the archipelago environment does not appear. See Strindberg, Samlade Verk, XXXIII, Nio enaktare 1888-1892, red. G. Ollén, 1984: 211-273: see also Persson 2004: 189-194, and Meidal 2012: 259.77 See Graf 1965: 53-58; and Delumeau 1992: 23, 34-35, 229-230, 237-241.78 Carlson 1979, in particular p. 15-46. Even Kymmendö, the greening island, is mentioned as Strindberg’s image of Eden (p. 17), but the archipelago remains outside the mythopoetic field investigated by Carlson.79 See Wästberg 1973: 49-53; and Meidal 2012: 379-380.80 Deuteronomy 27:11-13. Strindberg, Samlade Verk, LIX:1, Ockulta Dagboken, red. K. Petherick / G. Stockenström, Stockholm 2011: 197.81 The concept of autobiographical space is introduced by Philippe Lejeune in Le pacte autobiographique (1975: 23 and 41-43, and with reference to André Gide: 189-217. The uses of the autobiographical space in Strindberg are explored in Robinson 1986, K. Dahlbäck 1991, and K. Dahlbäck 1994.82 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, XLIV, Dödsdansen, red. H. Lindström, Stockholm 1988.83 The motif of ‘Lilla helvetet’ (Little Hell) is already introduced by Alice in the first part of Dödsdansen; see SV XLIV: 109. In Wirmark 1989: 83-85, the outdoor space, the marine landscape, is interpreted as the metaphysical promise of liberation from the imprisoned human condition.84 SV XLIV: 22: ‘[...] det är ett samfund av idioter [...]’.85 SV XLIV: 117: ‘[KURT:] Om en timme äro vi i stan! Då skall du se vem jag är...

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[ALICE:] Så går vi på teatern i afton! för att visa oss! [...]’ 86 Wirmark 1989: 83: ‘Strindberg är medvetet inexakt när han förlägger sitt drama till en ö utan namn, en ö som ej kan pekas ut på kartan. Den saknar namn men kallas ’lilla helvetet’ av ortsbefolkningen. Staden dit båten går har inte heller något namn och man får inte veta hur många timmar det tar att resa dit’. (Strindberg is consciously inexact when he locates his play on an island without a name, an island which cannot be pointed out on a map. It is nameless but it is called ’the little hell’ by the locals. The town the boat goes to has not got a name either, and we do not get to know how many hours it takes to go there).87 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, XLVI, Ett drömspel, red. G. Ollén, Stockholm 1988: 54-67, 71-80. In between: 67-71, the Officer’s dream of his maths test at school takes place.88 This is even more true of Strindberg’s first revolutionary dream play, Till Damaskus I (To Damascus I) from 1898, Strindberg, Samlade Verk, XXXIX, Till Damaskus, red. G. Ollén, Stockholm 1991: 7-157. The Doctor’s house is the second station of the drama and, again, the second last station of it. The Doctor lives and works in the countryside, and his house is reached by a steamboat (SV XXXIX: 41: 153); this station is immediately after and before the starting and closing point of the drama, the Street Corner, i.e. the town. The fourth and fourth last stations are ‘By the Sea’, but they could be anywhere. Specific geographic determinations are avoided in this modern version of a Christian station drama about Everyman (See Ollén’s comment in SV XXXIX: 420).89 The history of Furusund in described in Grönblad 1970; see in particular the time from the quarantine station to the seaside resort: 46-93. Some parts are also dedicated to Strindberg and Furusund; see p. 94-109, 119-121. As to Strindberg and Furusund see also Ollén 1942, and Persson 2004: 217-240.90 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, L, Klostret. Fagervik och Skamsund, red. B. Ståhle Sjönell, Stockholm 1994: 113-238. The two stories called ‘Karantänmästarns Berättelser’ (SV L, pp. 153-254) (The Quarantine Master’s Stories) deal with unhappy marriages and are not set in the archipelago. The second of them is a version of the story about Strindberg’s second marriage, with Frida Uhl, better known as Klostret (The Cloister); compare SV L: 7-111 and 192-274.91 SV L: 116: ‘Här ser allt ut vara ordnat till den tre månars långa fest, som heter sommaren’.92 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, LI, Ordalek och småkonst och annan 1900-talslyrik, red. G. Ollén, Stockholm 1989: 7-84 and 85-198 respectively.93 Ollén 1941: 13-18; as to the archipelago motif see p. 42-45.94 Something of this spatial relation and atmosphere is detectable in the autobiographical novel Ensam (Alone) from 1903. The narrator and protagonist can at times long for nature, the coast and the sea, but has in any case decided to stay in town. See Strindberg, Samlade Verk, LII, Ensam. Sagor, red. O. Östin, Stockholm 1994: 22, 39-40, 50-52. See also Berendsohn 1962: 66-68.95 The strong ritual character of summer celebration in the Stockholm area at the turn of the century is underscored in Wästberg 1973: 10.96 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, LIII, Götiska Rummen, red. Conny Svensson, Stockholm 2001.

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97 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, LV, Taklagsöl. Syndabocken, red. B. Ståhle Sjönell, Stockholm 1984.98 As to the modernistic quality of Taklagsöl see Johannesson 1968: 246-266, and Ståhle Sjönell 1986, in particular pp.121-161.99 SV LV: 37: ‘Det var då jag upplevde två minuter, vilka stannat i mitt minne såsom verkligen motsvarande föreställningarne om De Saliges Öar och friden på jorden’.100 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, LXV, En Blå Bok I, red. G. Ollén, Stockholm 1997: 188. See also, in the same book, the text ‘Den Grönskande Ön ‘(The Greening Island), where the recollection of the first encounter with the natural scenery on Kymmendö is compared to a vision of paradise: SV LXV: 28.101 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, LXIII, Den världshistoriska trilogin. Dramafragment, red. G. Ollén, Stockholm 1996: 327-345.102 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, LXXI, Essäer, tidningsartiklar och andra prosatexter 1900-1912, red. C. Svensson, Stockholm 2004: 102-115.103 Strindberg, Samlade Verk, LXVII, En Blå Bok III-IV, red. G. Ollén, Stockholm 2000: 1451-1453.104 Barbro Ståhle Sjönell argues convincingly, though, that the review of one’s life, which characterizes the moment after death in the above mentioned texts, also determines the structure of the dying man’s monologue in Taklagsöl, including the vision of a human reconciliation that reminds us of the Fortunate Isles: another case in which the material and the immaterial sphere can touch each other and almost merge (1986: 76, 90, 95-104).105 Aspenström 1977: 78: ‘Ordet paradis är härlett från ett fornpersiskt, som betyder ringmur. Öar har inte sällan fått ersätta guldålderns inhägnade trädgårdar. Fördrivningen sköter vi själva, sedan gudarna dött’. Strindberg must have been familiar with such representations, since in the chamber play Pelikanen (The Pelican), from 1907, The Mother refers to Persian conceptions of paradise as a garden; see Strindberg, Samlade Verk, LVIII, Kammarspel, red. G. Ollén, Stockholm 1991: 290-291. As to Aspenström’s meditation on our conception of paradise, see the whole chapter: 71-78. In another chapter: 28-48, Aspenström writes about living near Strindberg’s myth on Kymmendö, at his very doorstep.106 Sten Selander, ‘Skärgården i litteraturen’, i Selander 1954: 445; and Wästberg 1973: 47.

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Documents

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